Why being busy doesn’t mean you’re productive

We live in a fast-paced business world, which keeps us busy at all times: during the day, during the night, at the office, at home. I’d like to share 5 strategies that can help you overcome your daily busyness - and make you more productive at the same time.

Busyness is one of the diseases of our time. We open our slack channel in the morning right after waking up. We run from business lunches to meetings - oftentimes without real outcomes. We answer mails in the queue of the supermarket. We keep busy. Constantly. That gives us the feeling of being productive. Working at that pace is only possible due to digitization, as we always have access to all of our tasks at a fingertip, and due to the fact that our work became more and more granular. When we are honest to ourselves we know that this mail we needed to answer right away could have waited another hour - or even half a day - and that we simply like the feeling to be needed, to be relevant and maybe to be even busier than a colleague. We work in a fast-paced business environment, and to keep up we have the urge to adapt to it. We assume that being busy gets us closer to our next promotion, to the next closing of a deal, to a newly acquainted client.

The result? A feeling of stress and being overwhelmed. In 2018, actually more than half of the employees in Germany felt very often or often stressed at work. Sustained stress, or a constant high stress level, can actually also have a quite severe impact on our health, as it can lead to high levels of circulating cortisol, the “stress hormone”. Having an ongoing high level of cortisol can create an allostatic load - which actually can be responsible for all kinds of physiological and psychological modifications like anxiety disorders, mood disorders, depressions or fever.

If that doesn’t sound severe enough; being busy actually keeps us from the one thing we human beings seek for: connection with others. We are highly depending on social contact, as it is our basic need to form and sustain relationships, to belong to a team, to a group. Busyness can already keep us from the basic foundation of forming these relationships: active listening. There is no way to follow a conversation honestly and openly if we constantly set ourselves under pressure with tasks to perform or if we are interrupted by our buzzing phone indicating new mails. And not only stress can lead to severe health problems - missing social contact as well. 

This is why we should try to eliminate factors of stress - namely being overly busy with our daily work. Here are 5 simple strategies to help you stop being busy. 

60/20/20 rule

I guess you’ve all come across Google’s 80/20 rule. At PEAK, we go a step further and design our weeks according to the 60/20/20 rule. We dedicate 60% of our time to our work with clients, workshops, coachings and also the project management that comes with it. The next 20% go to reflection and conceptualization: this time might feel unproductive as we are not generating tangible outcomes in the first place or we also don’t generate sales out of it, but it enables us to create even better experiences for our next clients or even drive innovation. Also you might have gathered interesting insights about your client’s needs in the work you’re reflecting on. And you can use this time to think about new products to meet these needs. My recently published book Agile Presentation Design was only possible because I strictly sticked to my schedule and did not fall for getting involved in even further projects - no matter how exciting they might have sounded. And the last 20% are blocked for coincidences, things that might just come up spontaneously, a short-notice request, or a project where some additional input might be required. 

Daily Check-in

We start everyday with a check-in. The whole PEAK team meets at 9, then we briefly discuss how we are, maybe how the evening before or the weekend was, and then we move individually into our tasks: discuss what we are currently working on, maybe open questions and plan what project we focus on for this day. On the one hand we obviously benefit from comments and recommendations about our own projects, and we are able to also adapt our workforce depending on who might need support and who has capacities left. 

To-do: Sit together with your time, set a time-timer (no one wants an additional meeting) and just quickly check-in, asking how everyone is in the first round and in the second round what he or she will be working on. Managing tasks will come naturally.

Heads up 

The check-in is a mini discussion about daily ad hoc tasks. From time to time (we do it approximately every 2-4 weeks), we extend the check-in: We look into all upcoming and ongoing projects and jointly evaluate where we stand, what are the next to dos and how we want to prioritize them. By bringing our joint team calendar on the screen, we see about all our clients and projects. With post-it notes we write our clients down and attach to-dos to them. Then we allocate responsibilities right away. With this structure, we always have the bigger picture in mind, are not getting lost in too many daily tasks and keep everyone on the same page. We also use the Eisenhower matrix - clustering our to dos according to it urgency and importance.

To-do: Bring post-it notes (big ones and smaller ones) and attach your computer to a larger screen, so that everyone has the visual overview of your calendar. Bring all projects and clients on post-it notes to the wall according to their priority, then move into the different tasks and lastly decide who takes over what to do. 

Stress Level Check

Even though we try our best not to be stressed, it doesn’t hurt to check in from time to time on the stress level of all team members with a simple scale question like “On a level from 1-10 how stressed do we feel right now?” Just like with the check-in you’ll be in the position right away to take adaptive actions and to find ways to minimize stress factors by allocating tasks to other team members. Also on a personal level it enables you to react maybe more empathic and tolerant to certain behaviour. 

Meditating

Meditation helps to increase your concentration power - which equals your productivity - through breathing exercises. When you’re a beginner or you just don’t have the time to do some serious meditation game, you can use centering: breathing in through your nose and counting to three, breathing out through your mouth and counting to six. Do it for approx. 5 minutes.

To-do: Try to find a routine that suits your schedule: either do it every morning before you start your day, or after lunch for example. You’ll see 5 minutes time invest will help you to get a lot more focused during the day. 

Retrospective

You’ve successfully completed a project? This is now where the real treasure lies: the reflection and the learnings. Through a proper debriefing with your client, within your team and also reflection on your own, you are able to evaluate aspects that went well and aspects that might need improvement. This time invest might feel unnecessary, especially as it doesn’t bring in sales, but it enables you to deliver a better service or design for all future projects. And we’d say that’s worth to invest some time into it. 

To-do: Already when a project starts, plan in sessions to do a debriefing and to reflect internally. Block hours in your calendar, so that reflection time doesn’t get overruled by daily business. 

If this is not enough and you want the full dose of productivity boost, you can also start using new apps that help you to become more focussed like Flowletics, helping you to be more often in the so-called flow state.

These were just simple steps and small adaptations enabling everyone - no matter how big the workload might feel - to release stress from daily work. But still accepting that busyness doesn’t equal productivity is probably the most important step. Are there other things that you already implement in your daily work to release from stress? It’d be great to learn about them!